IV

"There goes a great lady," said Brevis, and the salon drew a breath as though a spell were gone from it. Sound, colour, scent, straining forms began to rush about, evoke changes. Chairs, tables, rugs yielded themselves madly to the embrace of the young men, who carried them to the doors, to the French windows, and there left them. Out went Madam's harp on to the veranda under the bougainvilleas. One loud protesting note it made and was answered by a native hen down at the river. The band was on the veranda, setting out seats, tuning up. There was a crescent moon, a strong scent of magnolias, the wine at dinner had been very good.

In the doorway leading to the hall Brevis watched the young folk swing into the dance. Presently he himself would dance with some of those shining girls. It was good for his digestion; and he liked it, too, being always able to choose his partners. Again he tasted very pleasantly the experience of being famous page 388as one and another came up to talk. He held quite a levee among the elder men there at the door.

"It was Lottie had this door cut through into the hall," said Harry. "She thought it so ridiculous for people to have to go along the veranda. My grandmother said it spoiled the seclusion of her salon."

"So it has," said Richard. He had a fruity laugh and fruity voice. A prosperous man who would be useful, thought Brevis. "And much Lottie would care! She is all for common sense, our Lottie."

And that Madam never was, thought Brevis. Nor Jenny. He felt a little quickening sense of possession; a pity for himself that he had had to lose her. And it had been difficult for him, too, at the time of all the talk. If he had not been living in Melbourne and making himself a name there, some of the old brigade (not too strait-laced themselves) might have got him down.

It was a pretty sight to watch in Madam's old salon with the roses. Girls floating, flying, laughing with a marvel of bright hair and bright eyes in the arms of their lovers who were not like the young men of Brevis's youth. Sturdy fellows, these; brown and keen and hard of body and mind; indifferent to the little courtesies; sterner in the grain, abstemious. Very well able to look after himself, this new colonial man, and a tough customer in the witness-box, by George, with little reverence for his betters and little of the ancient grace. He laughed, this confident young colonial, at the old Victorian elegance, and Brevis had to meet him with a sharper note than the polished periods of the 'seventies and early 'eighties.

The orchestra was the best to be found since the real military bands had gone with the last of the real military, these twenty years past. In the musky dusk of the veranda it clattered out a polka, then mourned out a waltz.

"For she is not dead and she is not wed,
And she loves me now as she loved me then,"

sang the young people gaily to the music. Mab named some of the dancers to Brevis, who was asking for introductions. That fairy thing in white was Richard's Phyllis. There was Harry's Audrey pretty in blue. The rose-coloured Emily with chestnut page 389hair Mab couldn't place. It was Charlotte's Comyn who had just picked up the shy little girl with the snub-nose. Good Comyn was extraordinarily like his great-grandfather, the Captain; always in a hurry, always kind. That lanky fellow with the long chin was engaged to Emily. And the black-avised chap called Brian was the man whom Nan would marry.

"It seems a regular family gathering," said Brevis. "Am I the only outsider?" He saw the men look at one another, and went cold with a sudden shock. Good Heavens! If it was meant to be only family, what was he doing here? What interpretation would every one place on his coming? What would Jenny think?

Afraid to ask, he went to dance with Charlotte, Mary, Phœbe, and Maria. Jenny was apparently still with Madam; he had not seen that soft grey silk, those pearls anywhere in the crowd. When she came he must speak to Jenny; explain how he came to be here.

And now he was dancing with Nan. Heavens! it was good to dance with Nan, avoiding long trains and flying feet dexterously, going up and down under the heavy scent of the roses. This young Nan with lips like wine was such magic that he forgot Jenny and when the waltz changed to a polka he would not give her up. So they danced it, stamping, singing:

"Oh, can't you dance the polka?
Oh, won't you dance the polka?
The joys of earth are little worth
Unless you dance the polka."

Nan sang it glowingly, putting her feet down delicately like a mettlesome young filly, flinging back her shoulders until the young curve of the breast showed. The golden braids above her forehead had slipped sideways, giving her a roguish look. Some Pan should have come from the woods to crown her with asphodel. Brevis remembered Jenny revolving, crinolined, and demure, in the "Blue Danube." The music stopped.

"Oh, here you are, Brian!" said Nan, and was gone into the night. So there went young lovers, and he was an old man and out of breath, and here stood Jenny at the door.

"Shall we go and have some claret-cup, Jenny? Dancing's hot work."

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Jenny smiled. She had been "Miss Comyn" to Brevis until Nan warmed him up. He had always needed to be warmed up, cynical, excitable Brevis with his thin face worn so much thinner by the years, like a much used coin stamped with some rare Greek head. He had always been sensualist as well as ascetic, wanting what both heaven and earth could give. Well, he had loved her a little, thinking it much … and that had gone. And she had loved him with all her powers … and that would not go. Yet she would not hurt him to-night, since just to see him and talk to him would be a memory for quiet years.

"It's Lottie you should give claret-cup to. You nearly killed her," she said. "But she couldn't refuse the Judge of the Supreme Court."

He nearly said, "Could you?" and remembered that this was not Nan with whom he had had so many jokes. He felt strangely afraid of Jenny, and moved nervously about the library where so many were drinking and laughing, until rosy Phyllis, handling the big ladle, began to tease him. This was youth again, and he was hungry for it to-night. They squabbled, laughing over the strips of lemon peel in the silver bowl among the flat goblets, and Jenny sat by the window, thinking how very, very old Grandma had looked, lying still, with the night-light making ghostly shadows about the curtained bed while the pouncet-boxes and silver bottles on the table winked with wise eyes.

Jenny had cared for all these things since Celeste went to Purgatory instead of the Paris she had collected her endless thefts for. It had annoyed Celeste very much to leave them all behind. "C'était bien la peine," she had said bitterly. But Jenny had promised to put them all back and say nothing, which (said Celeste) was the least she could do since she was to go on living.

"Have you finished, Jenny? Shall we dance?" asked Brevis. He was frowning because Phyllis had just run out with Dick's boy, Leonard. His face had a dashed look as though he had cried to youth, "Play with me," and it wouldn't. Pitifully Jenny got up and went with him. It was going to take Brevis a long time to learn what until to-night she had thought she'd learned perfectly.

In the dance Brevis showed no life. His hand had no pressure. He looked over his shoulder at Nan and at rosy Phyllis. Jenny page 391thought with sudden fierceness: Yes; I've been your ploughed field all my life, and though you never sowed anything there, you expect to find the daisies that are in other men's fields. I shall say something to hurt you presently, Brevis.

"Rather warm for dancing, don't you think?" said Brevis, and Jenny stopped promptly under the rose festoons, seeing Nan waving her hand as she galloped by with skirts tossing.

"Now, do you know, Brevis, I had thought you rather cold."

"If I have said anything to annoy you I'm sorry," he said, frostily.

"Let me see. You said it was a charming dance and how well Grandma looked, No; neither of those sentences annoyed me. Did you produce any more? For I'm afraid I didn't hear them."

"Come out here," said Brevis, abruptly, and marched her on to the veranda. But there was no privacy there, with the musicians lounging about between the dances and the gardens full of fleeting laughing figures. So nervous that he was as clumsy as Mab, Brevis said: "I feel that I must apologize for being here to-night. I had no idea that it was to be a purely family gathering or I most certainly would not have come."

Jenny could just see the lean outline of his jaw in the edge of light, and she wanted so terribly to kiss it that instead she struck him with the cruelest words she could find: "Oh, you needn't be afraid. No one will put any interpretation on your coming at this late hour. If you had come twenty years ago, when I needed you rather badly, they might have interpreted it as the action of a man, anyway. Now every one knows that you are so superior to men that, like God, you are enabled to be the judge of ordinary men's shortcomings."

She left him before he could speak. But passing through the hall a little later she saw him again in the ball-room, skirting the wall, graceful as a tom-cat, going after Phyllis, after Rosamund, after Flo.

"Oh, how frightfully funny life is," she said, slipping an arm through Mab's.

Mab hugged the arm warmly. He had seen too little of Jenny through these years which had taken him so often to New Zealand, where Thompson & Comyn, Hide and Tallow Mer page 392chants,had established a branch office in Wellington. He had even had a wife there for a short time. A kindly creature soon drowned in crossing a wild New Zealand river. Mab did not remember her very often. Not so often as he remembered the young Julia.

"I should say so, dear maid," he said, thinking that Tasmania was really very much behind the times. Old Gamaliel needed jigging up. Old Bill needed a lot of jigging. And here came Humphrey, who looked as though he needed a tremendous lot of it. "Congratulations on that merino ram you sold in Sydney, Humphrey. A very fine price, by Jove."

Humphrey said he had wanted to keep him for the stud, but could not afford to. It had taken such years of culling to produce Emperor. Humphrey, without exactly complaining, was depressing, as though some jingling scarlet coach he had run to catch had gone by, leaving him standing in the rain.

"Uncle Mab, if you want a good laugh you must go to Latterdale," said Jenny. "Tell him some of the things your galahs say, Humphrey. Or I will."

Jenny mimicking galah parrots talking like angry bushmen with Maria trying to quiet them soon did away with depression, and Dick laughed loudly. Mab thought that Dick was rather loud all round; seeming always about to stick his thumbs in his armholes and throw out a diamond-buttoned waistcoat although never actually doing it. But he gave good advice about shares. Humphrey had benefited from brewery shares which had pulled Latterdale through when fluke, foot-rot, and scab were having a glorious innings in the Midlands; when crops were ruined by rain, and potatoes at scandalous prices had to be imported from New Zealand. Now scab, said Humphrey, cheering up wonderfully, had been finally scotched some years ago, and Tasmania would be a million pounds yearly the better for it. "But still," poor Humphrey always had a but,"there are the rabbits."

"There are," said Dick. "As we came past Blackfellow Knob this morning it looked so tawny in the sun that I hardly knew it. And then it suddenly turned over. I give you my word that it was solid with rabbits that went rolling off it like a wave."

"Dick always has a good story," said Jenny, appreciatively. She went a little further into the hall, looking out through the wide page 393doors on the night. Pale dresses, pale shirt-fronts gleamed and faded among the flower beds, along by the balustrade. Scents of crushed flowers—cherry pie, geranium—drifted in on the wings of laughter, of murmurs and loitering feet. All the difficult business of life turned into a game, a raree-show. "You ask if I am going to the masquerade," she murmured. "I am at it."

Dick said it was a pity old James Sorley had died before he got his Rabbit-proof-fence-across-the-island Bill through the House, although there was no other cause to regret him. Too many old men about. But not Mab, he added genially. Mab would never be old. Nor Noll. It gave him much pleasure to grease the downward slope for that dear old gentleman. "He lends us a tone that is too rare now, I assure you. And you should see the elegant way he patronizes us all, and how we all enjoy it. To be approved by Oliver Comyn is perhaps the greatest achievement in Hobart society, and it doesn't occur too often." He looked round complacently: a big, florid, handsome chap, prospering on the weaknesses of his kind and possessed of few himself. A chap, Humphrey thought, of whom Oliver Comyn would not secretly approve, however much (for the sake of that greased slope) he might pretend to.

William came sidling up, and Mab saw Humphrey and Dick look at each other as though wondering how such a vague old specimen had happened to produce them. William's head was bald and his manner deprecating, but he had fought once. Fought for Clent against the cranks of Government, against weather, against the Captain, just as the Captain had fought against blacks, bush-rangers, isolation, and all the other stark devils of the pioneers. William and the Captain had their definite places in the creation of a new land. But Noll, who had never fought anything, was Paris holding the apple of award in Hobart society.

"Bless you, Dad," said Dick, taking him jovially by the arm, "you look tired. Come and have a nip."

"Asoda-water and sandwich," said William, nervously. "With my digestion I assure you that I dare not …"